Matt Gurney: There's nothing shocking about a Quebec-obsessed French CBC

Radio-Canada: Ottawa won't dare mess with Quebec-obsessed French CBC

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is currently reviewing the broadcast licences for both the English- and French-language branches of the CBC. Such reviews are not exceptional — they are a normal part of the routine process of broadcasting licence renewal. But despite being largely routine, the renewal process has a splash of controversy this time. A report commissioned by the Senate claims to prove what many have long suspected: That Radio-Canada, the CBC’s French language service, devotes a disproportionate amount of its time and resources to covering Quebec, to the exclusion of the rest of Canada.

The survey, reported on by The Canadian Press, indicates that a review of Le Telejournal, Radio-Canada’s premier news program, had 42% of its coverage focused on Quebec. Only 20% focused on Canadian national news, and less than 6% on news in the other provinces and territories. The balance is given over to covering world news. This compares with The National, the CBC’s premier English-language broadcast, which focused 37% of its coverage on national news and 27% on provincial/territorial news (the balance, again, going to world news).

Again, no one should be surprised by this. There have long been grumblings that Radio-Canada is rife with separatists, and occasional defections of high-profile Radio-Canada journalists to the Parti Quebecois haven’t helped suppress that sentiment. It’s plain to see why separatists would want to keep Radio-Canada focused just on Quebec: The less Quebecers hear about the rest of Canada, the less attached to it they’ll feel. (Radio-Canada, for its part, insists that it does provide national coverage over the course of a programming day, just not necessarily during their primary broadcast.)

It’s important to be clear why Radio-Canada’s focus on Quebec, to the exclusion of the rest of Canada, is noteworthy. The CBC’s French-language services are not supposed to only report the news about French Canadians, but to provide national news, comparable to that available in English, to Canadians in the French language. It’s a subtle but important difference. Radio-Canada is not Quebec’s news service. It’s a Canadian service that’s broadcast in French. Big difference.

Or it’s supposed to be a French broadcast of Canadian news, at any rate. It has been able to act as if it’s Radio-Quebec for such a long time that French-speaking Canadians in other provinces — there are sizable communities of French Canadians in Ontario and New Brunswick, for instance — are agitating for a third option. They want to see another CBC branch created, one that provides French-language Canadian content. You know, what Radio-Canada is supposed to be doing, but isn’t.

It’s unlikely that any new services will be established. Indeed, the CBC is facing budget cuts and is striving to do the same with less, let alone more. But it’s even harder to imagine fundamental change being imposed on Radio-Canada. As said above, Radio-Canada has been its own little operation for so long that any attempt to bring it back onto the reservation, as it were, would face the kind of subtle institutional resistance that only entrenched bureaucracies can offer.

Besides, Radio-Canada knows that its licence is going to get renewed. The CRTC hearings aren’t precisely a formality, but they’re pretty gosh-darned close. Keep in mind that the CBC is mandated to provide French-language radio and television service by the government. The notion of that same government then revoking its ability to do so is patently absurd. The current Tory government might not be overly fond of either Quebec or the CBC, but it’s not going to allow Radio-Canada to just suddenly go dark.

That leaves the government with only the power of persuasion to go after Radio-Canada for its Quebec-centric focus, and even that is effectively a non-starter. There are issues of journalistic integrity and independence, of course, and even though it receives taxpayer support, Radio-Canada would pound the war drums about interference from Ottawa in editorial and programming decisions. That would resonate with people. And even if Ottawa did decide to push and demand more pan-Canadian content — actually push, not just muse about how nice it would be — that could easily flare up into a national unity battle that Ottawa has no desire to find itself in, given the current state of Quebec politics.

So, in the final analysis, the only thing that’s less surprising than a Quebec-obsessed Radio-Canada is the near certainty that it’s going to stay that way for a long time to come.